Mabon and the Harvest Moon
Wednesday gratefuls: Tom. Paul. P.E.T. scan. Radio isotopes. Irv. Sukkot. Harvests and Harvest festivals. Corn Dolly. Sheafs of Wheat. Combines and Corn Pickers. Plucking Tomatoes from the Plants in Artemis. Garlic on its way. Kale, Spinach, and Beets all doing well. Carrots growing, too. All in cold frames. A frost yesterday morning.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Rabbi Rami Shapiro
Life Kavannah: Wu Wei.
Week Kavannah: Yesod. Groundedness.
Tarot: paused
One brief shining: Once more into the breach, or in this case, the large machine with its bits able to see the uptake of a PSMA, a prostate membrane specific antigen delivered into my bloodstream by injection, the needle itself coming in a lead lined box until it penetrates my skin, protecting the imaging tech, not me, since this antigen has a radioactive tracer attached.
October Health Month: Continues today with yet another PET scan. This one because my PSA rose slightly and Dr. Buphati wants to know, as do I, what, if anything has happened to my metastases. I hope very little. The path could take a turn here, though I would prefer it not. I’ll know more, possibly as early as tomorrow.
My son, who has Hepatitis B, also goes in for scans on the 10th. In his case they’re checking the liver. Hep B, which he got at birth, as do many Asian and South Asian babies, can cause liver cancer.
A friend of mine goes for a PET scan on the 28th, I believe, checking, in his instance for prostate cancer. A diagnostic scan. It’s a small world under the sophisticated magnifying glasses we have today.
An old internist told me that each of us is a black box. All unique, yet similar. Once we cross the swaying bridge to chronic disease we need these high tech imaging systems to peer inside the black box; yet, we see through a glass darkly. Even the most sophisticated of them offer only approximations of what is there.
Medicine as art. Decisions get made, life altering or life saving decisions with often only hints, perhaps big hints, but with large margins for error. In spite of the general and well earned cynicism about medical care I remain in awe of these men and women, like Kate, who devote their lives to helping us with what remain crude and often fallible instruments. And with proximate knowledge only of how to fix what ails us.
Insurance companies, on the other hand? Not awe. But frustration at the corruption of a sound idea, spreading our collective risk over millions, hundreds of millions. In the hands of Big Medicine’s executives the art is how to wring the most premium dollars out of us while paying out as little as possible.
An art measured not in health preserved, not in lives extended, not in compassionate care given, but in the easier to understand bottom line. Money, or revenue capture, taints the whole practice of medicine, nowhere as much as in the C-Suites of outfits like United Health, Humana, Blue Cross.
Next week in health month: Glaucoma check and nerve ablations!